My daughter posted this on Facebook today.
But you know the truth is that few of us actually recognize the precariousness of our situation, instead believing that we are somehow protected by more than just a thin layer of gases that surrounds the Earth.
Personally I find the idea that we are hanging in space, surrounded by a life giving bubble, and orbiting a giant ball of fire kind of exhilarating. Looking at it from that perspective sort of changes us from boring humans comfortably living out our lives on a mother earth, to courageous cosmonauts hurtling through space at blinding speeds, surrounded by potentially deadly planetary bodies, and with nobody at the helm.
Oh yeah, that is TOTALLY how I am going to think of us from now on!
Totally awesome!
ReplyDeleteIt's not a birthday to me, it's another trip around the sun.
ReplyDeleteIt gets even more exciting when you consider that the earth is traveling around the sun at 60,000 mph, and the solar system is revolving around the galactic center at 568,000 mph. On top of that the Milky Way galaxy itself is traveling through space at 190 miles per second! So even when we are sitting still, we are anything but.
ReplyDeletei was going to write this very thing but you did it better and with more info. we mere humans are super speed demons on the out out outside. i find it amazing how gravity keeps everything together under such dire circumstances of revolution and velocity
DeleteMonty Python's Galaxy Song comes to mind.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SY
ReplyDeleteJust remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.